23 February 2019 10:00 AM

Saturday PS: Crystal balls all round

SOME years ago, a colleague questioned a lobby journalist (for any overseas readers, these are the senior political hacks with access to Ministers and MPs) and asked how it was that he and his colleagues tended to be pretty much spot on about the possible dates of forthcoming general elections (this was before the fixing of Parliamentary terms)?

Out of a possible 365 days, the lobby journalists narrowed it down to maybe three, one of which would prove correct. Were these dates leaked to them, he asked?

Not at all, came the reply. When you knew the secret, making such predictions was not difficult.

By custom, he explained, general elections take place on a Thursday, immediately narrowing the choice from 365 days to 52. They cannot take place in the winter months (the recent exception, February 1974, happened during aState of Emergency), nor during the summer holidays. The weeks either side of Easter are usually ruled out, as are school terms, other than half-terms, given the widespread use of schools as polling stations.

With that chunk of Thursdays disposed of, whatever’s left can be further whittled down by special factors.

The last election held in neither May nor June was in 1992. Daringly, radically, it was held in April.

I can’t help thinking someone could make quite a nice career out of forecasting on the basis of one of two similarly tried and tested techniques.

Take the labour market. Just as everyone is marvelling at how well it is doing is probably the time to call the top. It has been in the past – the late Sixties (after the long post-war boom) was the big one, but there was a quieter echo at the end of the Eighties.

Conversely, the late 2000s, when the trade unions seemed to be in terminal decline, was probably the right moment to predict a revival. Sure enough, the current decade has seen a spate of transport strikes and a newly-influential breed of union leaders calling at least some of the shots in the Labour Party.

The objection that unions are strong “only in the public sector” is no objection at all. Quite the opposite. Which would you prefer to endure – a strike at your children’s school, or on your commuter route, or a walk-out at a Midlands engineering firm you’ve never heard of?

On a more trivial note, how smart did you have to be to forecast that the popularity of the Duchess of Sussex would start to wane if, as threatened, she made a habit of promoting right-on viewpoints? Answer: not very. I did so, here, on May 26 last year.

A final example. From the Falklands in 1982 to the initial attack on Afghanistan 19 years later, the only question asked when Our Boys went into action was just how overwhelming their victory would be. Anyone who imaged this would continue indefinitely hasn’t read any military history.

And this, of course, is the point behind all these examples is that the predictions are based on previous patterns: no economic trend, good or bad, lasts forever, and the same is true of the popularity (or otherwise) of minor Royals (or even some major ones).

Such predictions are almost entirely informed by historical patterns. Which works fine – normally.

A while ago, it was explained to me why artificial intelligence in financial markets will always have to be overseen by one or more humans. An example related to the dive in sterling’s value immediately after the June 2016 referendum result.

Accumulated data would tell a machine that the pound always bounces back from such slumps, gradually after 1967 and 1992 and strongly after 1976 and 1985. It would take a human to know that Brexit was taking the pound into uncharted waters and the past was no guide to the future.

Ah yes, Brexit. Anyone care to venture a prediction or two on that? No, I thought not.

Saturday miscellany

WHAT else is left to say about the Independent Group of MPs (the title is presumably deliberately ironic, given their aim is thwarting British independence)? At least the eight Labour defectors had the excuse of the party’s indulgence of anti-semitism (although I take it seriously only from Luciana Berger and Joan Ryan). The ship-jumping Tories don’t have even that excuse. Watching Wednesday’s press conference, I had to laugh as Anna Soubry reeled off all her personal achievements, almost down to the level of school swimming badge and National Cycling Proficiency. Fellow defector Sarah Woollaston told us she used to be a GP. You know, I’m sure she’s mentioned that before.

WHICH puts me in mind of my own theory about the true technological horror of our time, not comparatively-new (anti) social media, but, about 30 years old this year, rolling television “news”. As there is nowhere near enough real news to fill the available airtime, it has to be invented, usually in cahoots with under-employed politicians and assorted campaign groups. How many dumb laws and stupid public outlays has this led to?

I have just finished a highly-praised contemporary psychological thriller, I won't name it because it's enjoyable and I wouldn't want to spoil it. But the central premise, that we are meant to suspect a female character to be in danger from a male character when, in a coup de theatre, we learn it is the other way round, didn't strike me as particularly new - think of the 1974 film Deadly Strangers, starring Hayley Mills and Simon Ward. But doubtless we will be told this book "broke new ground" in portraying the man as victim. In much the same way, old ground is always being broken anew in music: once, Dusty Springfield was the "first" independent female star, then it was Suzi Quatro followed by Debbie Harry, Madonna, the Spice Girls and so on. There is something pseudo-religious in this endless repetition of "first times", in all this "new" ground that's always gittin' isself bruck.

A fine piece here by Margaret Sullivan in TheWashington Post on January 30 on the “smarmy centrism” of modern political commentary. It ought to be required reading for all those hacks in paroxysms of ecstasy over the abovementioned “independents”